We Have All Been Here Before

In the day-to-day hustle and bustle of our working lives, our sense of deja vu can easily be overlooked. This sense may be reawakened at any moment, of course, but often those of us with lesser psychic powers must rely on a foreign setting to achieve such insight.

On the St. Charles Street streetcar in New Orleans in the 1980s, for example, I once stared at the pattern of a woman's print dress and felt instantly transported back to the 1940s, when Tennessee Williams resided there.

Or walking the streets of Baltimore in the early 1970s, I remember seeing old rag men hunched over their reins, as swaybacked nags, festooned with a colorful, feathered headdresses, clopped down narrow streets lined with rowhouses, the sound of wagon wheels conjuring up Edgar Allen Poe's world.

Time is a blur waiting to be captured.